Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

blackopient · 2011-01-15 18:51:47

I was going through obscure, random and otherwise RPG's I've never played, to rip tilesets for use in a possible hack of Pokemon Gold (not a visual artist in the 8bit realm), when I stumbled upon this game:

Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru!

After playing it a bit I was surprised to find so many similarities it has with the Pokemon engine.

Here it seems like a pretty standard top down perspective RPG:

Until the first battle you encounter:

Wow, I was amused at how similar the battle system is set up.

This is just a look at the party (only me for now):

Then some weird ghost things talk to me about who knows what:

and I'm transported to a town:

I'm curious now to see what the start menu looks like and.. well:

it looks pretty much like Pokemon's.
This is the stats of a new member that joined my party:

The items screen:

and a Pokede... I mean.. well some kind of catalog of people, monsters, and ghosts I've seen, and which ones I have capt.. er.. have joined my team:

This is just the options screen from the main menu:

The rest is just me playing through the game a bit, admiring the graphics:

But you don't get transported to a Pokecenter when you're main character, Kitaro, dies:

There's very little difference from Pokemon Red (other than this game runs a bit cleaner and faster). Could it possibly be based off of the same engine as Pokemon? or just heavily inspired by.

A translation of this game would be great, it seems like it'd be pretty fun.
I couldn't find barely any information it online. What do you all think?

Last edited by blackopient (2011-01-15 18:53:03)

Mateo · 2011-01-15 19:28:43

Wow, that's really interesting. I downloaded a copy and played around a bit. I don't thin its the same engine as Pokemon, since the way you walk around maps is different (the screen follows you, until you run out of map then you just walk around, with no border tiles). Also since it came out the same year as Pokemon, but by a different company, I think it was probably just a really interesting coincidence. that the engine feels similar, and it is especially cool that so many elements are as similar as they are. This is a pretty neat find.

koolboyman · 2011-01-15 22:24:21

I took a look at the engine, and it seems to be different. (For example, this game uses 2x2 metatiles while R/G uses 4x4, the monster pics don't use any compression) Red/Green was released on 02/27/96 and this game was released on 12/13/96. So they probably just based it off of the Red engine due to its popularity.

Last edited by koolboyman (2011-01-16 00:17:48)

Tauwasser · 2011-01-16 00:08:04

I doubt that the engines are based off of each other at all.
There are countless engines that follow the same principles. Think about "Survival Kids", "Devil Children", "Harvest Moon", "Zelda" etc. The fact that the menus look the same is probably due to the fact that it is a semi-optimal arrangement for data of this kind. If you know that all names will only be eight characters max, you would automatically come to the conclusion that a list arrangement with name on the left and hp on the right works best, instead of squeezing it all together when you don't really have to.

Start menu is the same. Having a start menu with options listed one underneath the other is no new idea and certainly was not innovative at that time either.
The fact that the positioning is top-right is probably due to the fact that it is the original Japanese text start and indeed many signs in Japan today are made up that way. The width is determined by the longest word, so it happens to be five characters, mostly. Also, Japanese first names tend to be five characters at most as well, so no problem there.

I think a lot of these things are really just occurrences that happen naturally and don't really have an explanation of who copied from whom. If you think about it, a Western audience might expect a start menu to appear on the left edge more often and sometimes localization will change the place of menus to adhere to that logic.
So I think it's somewhat a classic over-head look 2D perspective that designers start with and the menus evolve with your data (sizes, modes of representation etc.).

I think the only innovative thing in R/B was that the battle screen features your own Pokémon as well. I think at least all other Western games (or rather Japanese games that were released in Western countries) up to that point had the somewhat classic enemy-only perspective, so you'd control your own party only via a menu without actually seeing it. This of course was at the cost of many-to-many battles that the older games featured.

cYa,

Tauwasser

Last edited by Tauwasser (2011-01-16 00:11:09)

~Red · 2011-01-17 20:01:02

I think it is based on Red's engine. There are differences, but I'm guessing this is because they hired an actual team of people to modify the engine to their needs. But it's too much of a coincidence to have such a graphical similarity.

IIMarckus · 2011-01-18 04:52:40

~Red wrote:

I think it is based on Red's engine. There are differences, but I'm guessing this is because they hired an actual team of people to modify the engine to their needs. But it's too much of a coincidence to have such a graphical similarity.

The graphics have some similarities, but actual gameplay has very little. Menus, text speed, overworld warps, and such behave differently. Koolboyman pointed out that the maps and images use a different format as well. I think it’s very unlikely that this game was based on Red.

Mateo · 2011-01-18 08:19:28

Indeed, after playing it a bit I find it has a good bit different feel in how the gameplay "handles" I guess you could say. But graphically it is indeed very similar, even more so than the fake Pokemon Diamond and Jade that people believed were real.

~Red · 2011-01-18 18:36:40

I don't think it would take much for a chinese bootleg company to take this and make a fake pokemon game.

Mateo · 2011-01-18 19:31:10

I'm kinda surprised they haven't already, haha

y0r124 · 2012-10-10 09:40:56

Whoa, this post almost not touched over a years,
I downloaded this game and played it, I was interest in this game, did anyone know where to found another information about this game?

Skeetendo

#1 2011-01-15 18:51:47

Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#2 2011-01-15 19:28:43

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#3 2011-01-15 22:24:21

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#4 2011-01-16 00:08:04

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#5 2011-01-17 20:01:02

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#6 2011-01-18 04:52:40

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#7 2011-01-18 08:19:28

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#8 2011-01-18 18:36:40

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#9 2011-01-18 19:31:10

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

#10 2012-10-10 09:40:56

Re: Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Souzoushu Arawaru! - Pokemon..?

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